I can barely send 500MB to a Mac from Windows without the Mac timing out, then needing a break before it's available over the network again. They better have hired Microsoft engineers to fix their SMB implementation.

I would guess they don't use it for the same reason they're abandoning AFP - ubiquity. SMB/SAMBA is simply used more than NFS is. Even on most Linux distros I've tried out, they use SAMBA by default with NFS as a third party package you have to install.

SMB2 windows to windows... I routinely see transfer rates of 110-120 MB/s - and that's just dragging and dropping files between shares in the GUI. That's almost gigabit wire speeds. Add OS X to the mix and yeah... not so much.

I would guess they don't use it for the same reason they're abandoning AFP - ubiquity. SMB/SAMBA is simply used more than NFS is. Even on most Linux distros I've tried out, they use SAMBA by default with NFS as a third party package you have to install.

Not only that but setting up nfs, specifically nfsv4 so you can actually preserve permission information and other advanced features is a pain in the ass.

Frankly, these days, the only file sharing protocol I trust to transfer files at a reasonable speed is SFTP.

Everything else I've used on LANs—between Windows machines, between Macs, and from one to the other—tends to crawl along at something like 100KBps, while SFTP has the ability to actually saturate the link, and get my 500MB file from the server to my laptop in less than 2 hours. (Disclaimer: I mostly use Macs, so the Windows information may be out of date.)

Honestly, much as I dislike Microsoft and its products, I don't care that much which protocol Apple uses for file sharing, so long as it works well. If this switch to SMBX is accompanied by a focus on getting it to actually use some reasonable fraction of the available bandwidth, I'm all for it.

That said, SMB2 support is nice I suppose, but as someone who depends on over-the-network time machine backups to a OSX Server box (or possibly soon, time capsule), I need AFP to stick around, until Apple allows TM over SMB2 (if thats even possible).

Altough it is a pretty widespread myth for some reason, SMBX does not currently support SMB2, it is still a SMB1 implementation.

A SMB2-compatible SMBX in the next OS X would be something that is new, beyond the fact that it replaces AFP.

I'm not sure that's right. Do you have a link with info? Everything I'm seeing indicates the opposite: SMBX supports SMB2, but explicitly dropped support for SMB1. This led to widespread complaints when SMBX entered the wild with Lion because the lack of SMB1 broke lots of things (like transferring files to and from from OS X boxes to older network scanner/printers, for example).

Jobs and McNealy used to be arch-rivals back in the NeXT/Sun days, but they also had a lot in common and kept the Unix fire alive. Now with both Jobs and Sun gone, old-school Unix is a dusty relic of the past. Oh well.

Jobs and McNealy used to be arch-rivals back in the NeXT/Sun days, but they also had a lot in common and kept the Unix fire alive. Now with both Jobs and Sun gone, old-school Unix is a dusty relic of the past. Oh well.

Apparently licensing issues might have stopped it:"Sun's Jeff Bonwick confirmed that Apple and Sun weren't able to reach a mutually agreeable licensing deal, though he could not disclose any specific details."

That was a much safer image than something related to seeing 'Russia from your door step'

Considering how poorly the current implementation of smb is in apple's OS, this scares me a bit. I routinely transfer files larger than 4GB, and apple's SMB just doesn't consistently handle that. I am horrified at the thought of transferring my 30-60 GB DMGs.

Apparently licensing issues might have stopped it:"Sun's Jeff Bonwick confirmed that Apple and Sun weren't able to reach a mutually agreeable licensing deal, though he could not disclose any specific details."

Who knows at this point; Ellison could have made it happen after the buyout. At this point, though, OS-X is running the flat-head engine of file systems, and it's getting to be a real liability.

Apparently licensing issues might have stopped it:"Sun's Jeff Bonwick confirmed that Apple and Sun weren't able to reach a mutually agreeable licensing deal, though he could not disclose any specific details."

Who knows at this point; Ellison could have made it happen after the buyout. At this point, though, OS-X is running the flat-head engine of file systems, and it's getting to be a real liability.

Sorry for the off-topic rant.

I agree it is a liability, and I am quite worried that I will sooner or later find that the integrity on a bit level of files in my photo library have been slowly deteriorating because HFS+ can't ensure that my files are identical to what they were the day they were created.

Everything else I've used on LANs—between Windows machines, between Macs, and from one to the other—tends to crawl along at something like 100KBps, while SFTP has the ability to actually saturate the link, and get my 500MB file from the server to my laptop in less than 2 hours.

Uhhh, what? That's horribly slow. I can transfer a file from my windows machine to my NAS using SMBv2 (or even SMB, the speeds were nearly identical) in less than 15 seconds, and that's being generous. It would probably take less than 8. Something is wrong with your setup.

I would guess they don't use it for the same reason they're abandoning AFP - ubiquity. SMB/SAMBA is simply used more than NFS is. Even on most Linux distros I've tried out, they use SAMBA by default with NFS as a third party package you have to install.

Not only that but setting up nfs, specifically nfsv4 so you can actually preserve permission information and other advanced features is a pain in the ass.

Yeah, that too. My NAS supports various protocols and one day I got curious to see what kind of speeds I could get out of NFS by connecting my Linux VM to my NAS. So I went online and looked for a handy guide in setting up NFS shares.

This is great if they fix the problem that SMBX currently has in comparison with Windows SMB: setting "attrib +r <folder>" on Windows means only that the folder might have a special file icon, because the real permissions are set elsewhere. On SMBX, it maps to the 'nouchg' flag, which makes the folder immutable. So you can't copy "system" folders (say, 'My Documents') from Windows to OS X. Because what happens is that it creates the folder, marks it immutable in HFS+, and then all the following writes fail.

I agree it is a liability, and I am quite worried that I will sooner or later find that the integrity on a bit level of files in my photo library have been slowly deteriorating because HFS+ can't ensure that my files are identical to what they were the day they were created.

It can tell you if a file got corrupted, but unfortunately cannot fix it. It also requires running the checks manually, as opposed to happening automatically with ZFS. Nonetheless, for anyone who has to move a lot of data around using OS-X, it's better than nothing.

At least the utility is fast. (It runs almost as fast as the disk's interface will allow.)

Apparently licensing issues might have stopped it:"Sun's Jeff Bonwick confirmed that Apple and Sun weren't able to reach a mutually agreeable licensing deal, though he could not disclose any specific details."

Who knows at this point; Ellison could have made it happen after the buyout. At this point, though, OS-X is running the flat-head engine of file systems, and it's getting to be a real liability.

Sorry for the off-topic rant.

The Ford Flathead V8 is a perfectly fine engine. I get just shy of 500HP in my '50 Mercury. Also get around 26MPG on Premium (EFI+Engine block from 1939 Fun times)

I would guess they don't use it for the same reason they're abandoning AFP - ubiquity. SMB/SAMBA is simply used more than NFS is. Even on most Linux distros I've tried out, they use SAMBA by default with NFS as a third party package you have to install.

Not only that but setting up nfs, specifically nfsv4 so you can actually preserve permission information and other advanced features is a pain in the ass.

Yeah, that too. My NAS supports various protocols and one day I got curious to see what kind of speeds I could get out of NFS by connecting my Linux VM to my NAS. So I went online and looked for a handy guide in setting up NFS shares.

Nopenopenopenopenopenopenope.

Wow. I've been running NFS as long as I've used linux and it's a hell of a lot easier to set up and get working than samba, and it preserves unix permissions automatically. Running files off of the server is no slower, perceptively, than running off of a local disk.

I can barely send 500MB to a Mac from Windows without the Mac timing out, then needing a break before it's available over the network again.

I regularly pass around ~10GB virtual machine images via SMB on Mac and have never seen this problem.

Then I'm guessing you're one of the lucky few. File sharing over SMB is one of the major Mac problems we have at my place of employment. So much so, that we quit trying to work with it. We set up a NAS that the Mac's can use AFP to transfer their files to be shared and the Windows and/or Linux machines can use SMB or NFS to talk to the NAS.

Small files over SMB with the Mac were never a problem for us, but once you got over 100MBs, it was hit or miss.

I can barely send 500MB to a Mac from Windows without the Mac timing out, then needing a break before it's available over the network again.

I regularly pass around ~10GB virtual machine images via SMB on Mac and have never seen this problem.

For me if I have the Windows machine acting as the SMB server I can happily transfer to and from it with the Mac, but as soon as I make the Mac the SMB server with Windows having to be the client it will frequently time out and lose its connection. It's just not consistently reliable enough.

Everything else I've used on LANs—between Windows machines, between Macs, and from one to the other—tends to crawl along at something like 100KBps, while SFTP has the ability to actually saturate the link, and get my 500MB file from the server to my laptop in less than 2 hours.

Uhhh, what? That's horribly slow. I can transfer a file from my windows machine to my NAS using SMBv2 (or even SMB, the speeds were nearly identical) in less than 15 seconds, and that's being generous. It would probably take less than 8. Something is wrong with your setup.

It's not been just one setup, but like I said, it's been some time since I had to deal frequently with Windows, especially Windows-to-Windows filesharing.

Now they just have to catchup and implement SMB3. SMB3 is as much an improvement over SMB2 as SMB2 was an improvement over SMB1. I'm not a huge fan of MS technology, but SMB3 is solid, and fast over low or high latency links.

I agree it is a liability, and I am quite worried that I will sooner or later find that the integrity on a bit level of files in my photo library have been slowly deteriorating because HFS+ can't ensure that my files are identical to what they were the day they were created.

You might have to use command-line utilities for this, but you can generate parity and recovery files (PAR2s) that will repair damage up to a certain point. On files I really care about, like the FLAC rips I so painfully did of my full music collection, I've devoted an extra 10% disk space to recovery. Between that and backups, any kind of subtle damage should be trivially fixable.

It would be nicer to automatically do this at the filesystem level, like with ZFS, but you CAN protect yourself if you want. But I don't know if the Mac has any GUI programs to generate PAR2s. The command-line utilities I used on my Linux server should work fine on any Mac, but if you don't know any scripting at all, it might take some learning. In particular, spaces in the filenames can potentially give you fits, where GUIs typically handle that with aplomb.

Wow. Very interesting. The number one reason my home network is still an all-Windows shop is because of troubled support for SMB. Sharing files easily is a must out of the box for anything I use.

I'm not saying I'm going to run out and buy a Macbook.. but still, every intriguing.

Mine is all Mac for the same reason - I use a MBP day-to-day, and I've tried transferring to and from a couple of Windows machine both with the Windows mounted from the Mac and with the Mac mounted from Windows, and get constant errors and timeouts.

I don't get the same issues transferring to and from Linux, nor was it so unreliable prior to Lion.